My biggest complaint after one week of using Monarch
Monarch is fantastic. It's very clear after just a week of using it, and I will stay on as a subscriber. But now that I've got my accounts and budget set up, I've figured out a design problem that the Monarch team should tackle.
Monarch doesn't have a consistent treatment of cash and non-cash accounting. It seems set up to produce a cash flow statement and an income statement, but it only recognizes some non-cash transactions.
For example, my monthly mortgage payment is a cash expense. I want to plan for that amount to leave my checking account every month. But the payments get charged against my mortgage loan, which is a separate liability account. The reduction in principal is not income, its me converting cash to a reduction in my liabilities. So I want to track both the cash expense on a cash flow statement and recognize that paying down principal doesn't affect my net worth. I'm more interested in tracking the interest on my mortgage, which is the true expense reducing my net worth. But because the interest is charged against my liability account and I don't explicitly pay for it from out of my checking account, Monarch doesn't want to include it in my budget. It just defaults to the catch-all mortgage payment.
So that's my request for the Monarch team -- can you set up separate budgets for cash flow statements and income statements?